charliewrites

“Most of what you study in school you are highly unlikely to ever use in a job—if you even remember it.”

I wish I had asked Bryan about the value of universal education for society in terms of creating opportunities for specialization: Most kids will never use their high school biology, higher math, history, and physics in their future jobs. But some will. And those doctors and scientists and engineers are really important for society. Given that, is it worth the cost of exposing everyone to these subjects because we don't know in advance which kids will take to them (and later become highly valuable contributors to society)?

I also liked these quotes from the original interview, but didn't include them for the sake of brevity:

On favorite languages/frameworks: Ruby on Rails, definitely. I just fell in love with it, it was so much easier to get something built that was actually robust and it didn't feel like it was just gonna break, compared to all the .NET stuff I was doing before. It just made me love programming again, and I still use it to this day. I've built all my custom Mad Fientist stuff with Ruby on Rails, and it's just so easy to put something together, deploy it to Heroku, and then you've got something that's usable. That's exactly what I did for the FI Laboratory. I just threw that together and threw it up on Heroku over a couple of weekends. I always expected to make it nicer and better, but I just never touched it and now it's got 60,000 users, and it's just absolutely crazy, and I'm still hardly paying anything: $29 a month I think.

On being extreme with finances: Personally, I'm pretty extreme. Every time I spend money, it's like the worst case scenario. So much thought process has gone into it beforehand. It's like, "Could I get it used? Could I borrow it? Do I really need it? Do I really want it?" And then, if all those things happen, then it's like, "Okay. I'll buy it." And then, I try to find it for the best price.

On the new iPhone: You don't need a new iPhone every year because, guess what? That iPhone 9 only made you happy for what, maybe a few weeks? And then, it was just a phone again until the iPhone 10 came along and you were like, "Oh, that's gonna make me happy." What's important is realizing that about yourself and looking at past purchases, thinking, "Oh, I spent a lot of money on that thing. Did it actually make me happy for very long? Could I have gotten it used instead? Did I need it at all?"

Some quotes that didn't make the final edit (but that I liked):

On being extreme with finances: Personally, I'm pretty extreme. Every time I spend money, it's like the worst case scenario. So much thought process has gone into it beforehand. It's like, "Could I get it used? Could I borrow it? Do I really need it? Do I really want it?" And then, if all those things happen, then it's like, "Okay. I'll buy it." And then, I try to find it for the best price.

On the new iPhone: You don't need a new iPhone every year because, guess what? That iPhone 9 only made you happy for what, maybe a few weeks? And then, it was just a phone again until the iPhone 10 came along and you were like, "Oh, that's gonna make me happy." What's important is realizing that about yourself and looking at past purchases, thinking, "Oh, I spent a lot of money on that thing. Did it actually make me happy for very long? Could I have gotten it used instead? Did I need it at all?"

On favorite languages/frameworks: Ruby on Rails, definitely. I just fell in love with it, it was so much easier to get something built that was actually robust and it didn't feel like it was just gonna break, compared to all the .NET stuff I was doing before. It just made me love programming again, and I still use it to this day. I've built all my custom Mad Fientist stuff with Ruby on Rails, and it's just so easy to put something together, deploy it to Heroku, and then you've got something that's usable. That's exactly what I did for the FI Laboratory. I just threw that together and threw it up on Heroku over a couple of weekends. I always expected to make it nicer and better, but I just never touched it and now it's got 60,000 users, and it's just absolutely crazy, and I'm still hardly paying anything: $29 a month I think.

Not only proving to companies what you know, but knowing what you know yourself: "I think for a long time I wanted to work at a company and do software development in a professional setting. But that was a really big stressor for me, because I've never really known how much I know. I assume that if I had gone to college and gotten a computer science degree, I'd know that I know about as much as the other people who also went through the course. And if I looked on LinkedIn and saw what jobs they were getting, I would know, Okay, that's about what I should aim for. I know about where I am. That was a huge barrier before when I was applying for jobs on my own, not knowing what my skill level was. I never knew how to present myself. I knew I wanted to write software in a professional setting, but I just didn't know how to get to that point."

Another clarification: this data only applies to general programming exercises and not domain-specific knowledge. For example, if your role requires bio-informatics knowledge (or ML or AI etc.), then by all means ask about bio-informatics—even if it means asking harder questions. (We do, however, recommend keeping the content of general programming exercises as vanilla as possible, so that you don't filter out someone because they lack mastery of a subject that you don't actually intend to measure.)

"There are a lot of intelligent people out there with skills that are being wasted. They could be making products that are going to further society, in the “greater good” sense. There's a disconnect between these good engineers and companies, which is just a waste of human resources. It's just crazy.

Companies like Triplebyte that are facilitating that connection have this trickle down effect on society. I've been very selfish in talking about the benefits to my own life, but this can really benefit society. It's not over night, and it's not necessarily very direct. But the existence of platforms like Triplebyte helps the percentage chance of propagating good stuff like that, which is all you can do."

- This seems like an important point to me. - I wonder how many people out there are like this? - The way credentials work (at least for fields like tech) seems broken.

As someone who just started working at a startup, I definitely resonate with the idea that you learn a lot more quickly and get to operate above your level. Of course, for him that meant creating Gmail.